Dear Montana Representatives:On February 13th, I had the opportunity to speak in Dennison Theater at the University of Montana (UM). Events leading to the speech as well as events occurring during the speech made it clear that the Montana legislature must act to restore respect for freedom of speech on its publicly funded university campuses. I write today to ask that you pass specific free speech legislation we have already adopted in my home State of North Carolina.Prior to my speech, in a bizarre statement to the entire university community, UM president Seth Bodnar stated, â€śOurs is a university driven...

When Mark Janus got his first paycheck working as a child support specialist for the state of Illinois in 2007, he was stunned to see a nearly $50 deduction for union dues. He had worked for the state in the 1980s and didn’t remember anything like it. “I’m going like, ‘I’m not a member of the union. What’s going on here?’” he said. Worse yet was where he saw the union dues going, such as to efforts demanding wage increases at a time when Illinois was struggling with a crippling pension debt. Now Mr. Janus is taking his case to...

A North Carolina mom started serving a week-long jail sentence for having her daughter baptized, according to reports. The 2016 baptism at St. Peter’s Catholic Church when the girl was 2 years old defied a judge’s order in a custody battle between unmarried couple, Kendra Stocks and Paul Schaaf, who are no longer together.

The free speech wars are getting worse, but it seems that none of the warring factions quite grasp the character of the dispute — or precisely what's at stake. At the figurative center of the clash is the norm of near-absolute freedom of speech and expression, which its defenders like to treat as the American default. A number of ideological challenges have arisen in recent years to overturn this norm. On many college campuses, groups of left-leaning students insist that free speech should be conditional on speakers adhering to explicit standards of diversity and avoiding the infliction of emotional harm...

Paying union dues and baking a wedding cake may not seem like classic examples of free speech—except perhaps at the Supreme Court. This year, the high court is poised to announce its most significant expansion of the 1st Amendment since the Citizens United decision in 2010, which struck down laws that limited campaign spending by corporations, unions and the very wealthy.

Joe Scarborough wants a “regulation” to be adopted that would force Facebook to inform readers of “lies” contained in Republican Facebook posts. Said Scarborough on today's Morning Joe: “As we’re talking about how 55% of Americans get their news from Facebook, and we talk about regulations that need to be put in place, there should be a threshold where they have to send out a blast to every Facebook subscriber that got these false stories [from Republicans] that the story they got was a lie.” Get the rest of the story and view the video here.

FBI Director Christopher Wray reportedly sent a letter of support to his employees at the bureau on Friday following the release of the much-hyped FISA memo, Business Insider reported. In the letter, released Friday evening by a BBC reporter, Wray attempted to rally his team by reminding its members that the work they do is important and “will always matter more” than what goes on in the press.

The court determined that Antifa leader Yvette Felarca's legal claim "was not brought in good faith." Hayward, CA – Antifa leader and middle school teacher Yvette Felarca was ordered to pay over $11,000 in damages to former Berkeley College Republicans President Troy Worden on Thursday, following an Alameda County Superior Court ruling. Felarca, a national organizer for antifa-aligned group By Any Means Necessary (BAMN), filed a civil harassment restraining order against Worden in September, 2017, and alleged that he stalked her by appearing at BAMN events, the San Francisco Gate reported. BAMN also led protests against conservative speakers who came...

Shelton shopkeeper Janice Danker said she’s receiving death threats. The reason? She accepted an antique German Nazi flag on consignment and hung it near a collection of World War II items in her store. A few days ago, someone took a photo of the flag at her shop, Games and Needful Things, and posted it on Facebook. Danker said the phone at her antique and secondhand store has been ringing nonstop ever since, and she’s received hundreds of phone calls, emails and social media messages. Many of the people are angry that a Nazi flag was displayed in and being...

The government's theory would equally criminalize insulting posts on a NRA page, or on a pro-Trump organization's page, or on a Communist Party page. In September 2016, Mark Feigin posted five insulting comments on the Islamic Center of Southern California's Facebook page (before he was finally blocked by the ICSC from commenting): • "THE TERROR HIKE ... SOUNDS LIKE FUN" (written in response to the Center's "Sunset Hike" announcement). • "THE MORE MUSLIMS WE ALLOW INTO AMERICA THE MORE TERROR WE WILL SEE." • "PRACTICING ISLAM CAN SLOW OR EVEN REVERSE THE PROCESS OF HUMAN EVOLUTION." • "Islam is dangerous...

It was apparently the Holy Grail of the left’s dream narrative , a white right wing terrorist with hordes of guns stopped in the nick of time from committing a mosque massacre by a bold black Democrat heroine! The way the facts seemed to fit the leftist template was so compelling that any Democrat party apparatchik would have jumped on the chance . Hard core Democrat/Socialist Kamela Harris was no exception. A fellow calls a mosque and makes threats. A mosque member following up on some anti-Islamic Facebook posts calls the Facebook man and thinks the voice is similar to the...

A crime blogger in Texas has been hit with felony charges by police, who accuse her of publishing information before it's publicly available, the Laredo Morning Times reports. According to the Washington Post, 32-year-old Priscilla Villarreal—who goes by Lagordiloca, or the fat crazy lady—is a popular figure in Laredo, where she livestreams from crime scenes on her Facebook page, which has 84,000 followers. But she says local police are fed up with her. And on Dec. 13 Villarreal was arrested and charged with two counts of misuse of official information. She says it's a "personal vendetta." The charges stem from...

The University of Virginia says it will not recognize a conservative club because the organization limits its membership to those who affirm conservative principles. In a letter on Friday, lawyers for Young America’s Foundation said the university’s policy is both “unconstitutional” and a violation of Virginia state law. “A pro-choice club may deny leadership positions to pro-life students, and a gun control group may determine that it does not wish to extend membership to NRA members,” Casey Mattox, senior counsel at the Alliance Defending Freedom, wrote in the letter. “Yet, by the terms of this policy — and its application...

It’s astounding how many defenses of the state’s position in Masterpiece Cakeshop depend on misrepresentation and misconceptions. Last week I wrote about the most common misrepresentation — that Jack Phillips discriminated on the basis of sexual orientation when he refused to design a custom cake for a same-sex-wedding celebration. After all, he served all customers — regardless of race, sex, or sexual orientation. He just consistently refused to design cakes that advanced messages he disagreed with. No person of any identity has the legal authority to compel an artist to use his talents to advance a cause the artist...

When something happens in my own community that triggers alarm bells, I am compelled to write. And this subject provides an excellent learning opportunity, which is one important purpose of the Language of Liberty series. Last Thursday, November 2nd, the City Board of Alderman in Sparta, Tennessee declined a motion to allow citizen input at City Board meetings. Their decision is now a part of the public record: a policy that alienates the people they represent and is repugnant to the Framers' original intent of free speech enshrined in the First Amendment. City Board meetings are required to be open...

To protect public health, safety, and morals, the government has an important interest in preventing women from going topless, a federal appeals court has ruled. And the importance of keeping lady breasts out of public view overrules any First Amendment or equal protection issues that such a policy raises. But at least one dissenting judge felt differently, describing our topless protagonist as having "engaged in the paradigm of First Amendment speech—a public protest on public land in which the participants sought to change a law that, on its face, treats women differently than men." Going topless might not be inherently...

Another horrible shooting has the Left talking about gun control, as if people already in violation of tons of other laws would be dissuaded by one more. So the Right responds by focusing on the Second Amendment, which is certainly legitimate and relevant, as it was intended to protect the American people from all manner of assaults, whether from a mugger in an alley, a street gang in the neighborhood, an enemy abroad, or a tyrant in our own capitol.. ...but we often forget the relevance of another Amendment, the First, which is increasingly under assault, particularly in the context...

Facebook general counsel Colin Stretch admitted to the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday that his company had taken down the account of Chinese dissident Guo Wengui, who lives in the US, on the strength of a report filed to the tech giant by the Chinese government. Guo, a billionaire living in New York City who is a harsh critic of the Chinese government, published on Facebook “sometimes outlandish tales of deep corruption among family members of top Communist Party officials,” the New York Times wrote a month ago, as it reported that Guo’s account had been taken down. Republican Sen....

WASHINGTON – The entertainment world has seen its fair share of groups take ownership of racially charged and sexually disparaging terms: Queen and N.W.A. (Niggaz Wit Attitudes) are a couple notable examples. But it was The Slants – an Asian-American dance-rock quartet that sought to reappropriate a term used against them by grade-school bullies – who found themselves defending First Amendment rights before the Supreme Court earlier this year. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office had denied their trademark application, arguing that the band’s name was disparaging to the Asian-American community despite the fact that band members had never fielded...